Photography is a way of making visible what is often overlooked

Introduction

In his short story ‘The Machine Stops’, E M Forster describes a world in which people live individually in physical isolation, connected by a sound and video conferencing mechanism. They converse and deliver edifying lectures to one another via this two-way screen but never meet in person. They live like this because they believe the air outside is poisoned. Here, they are told, they are safe – their needs catered for by an omniscient machine. First published in 1909, it is a prescient tale often cited when discussing the Internet in general and the Covid lockdown in particular. But it also describes a growing phenomenon in the developed world among young people alienated from modern society who find the competitive hustle of urban life oppressive. These latter-day hermits seldom if ever leave their apartment, conducting their lives online. They find a kind of freedom in turning inwards.

In this interview with the Russian photographer Natalia Ershova, we begin by discussing ‘Journey to the Edge of the Room’, a series of portraits of just such young urban hermits who find life online more appealing than the world outside. A response to the pressures of contemporary society, it is the first of three bodies of work that, in one way or another, reflect upon possible futures. The second series revisits a vision of the future that is now so outdated as to be irrelevant. The sculptures she depicts are huge – grandiose monuments to space travel as symbols of national pride – yet today people pass by without a second look. The answer, it would seem, is not out there… The gaze is once more downward and inward.

In the final and most recent body of work, she speculates on the augmentation of human capacity through the integration of a bio-engineered lifeform into the individual’s body. It suggests the prospect of a post-human age in which the meaning of ‘humanity’ is challenged taxonomically, empathically, ethically. Beneath these three bodies of work lie complex philosophical questions that gesture to the tangle of psychological, aspirational, and ideological dynamics that drive our notions of progress and shape the realities that transpire. Each series evokes a vision of the future: lone straws in the wind of the present day, the faded relics of an era that saw its destiny in the stars, and a speculative glimpse of the shape of things to come.

Alasdair Foster

---

Interview

What first drew you to photography?

When I was a kid, I read a lot and wanted to be a science fiction writer. At university I majored in journalism and, in second year, I was introduced to photojournalism. I got unsatisfactory grades for my first assignment but then spent the summer practising before resitting the assignment in the autumn. I really enjoyed it.

I have found photography a very fulfilling way of life, even a little romantic. It has allowed me to get to know people I would not otherwise meet, find out about their experiences. Photography is a way of making visible what is often overlooked. And photography can reach out into the world beyond the limitations of spoken language.

© Natalia Ershova – Eugene, 30 years old. Hermit for three and a half years. 2016
“To be in society has become impossible … I had to leave. I have no regrets about this because it has released a lot of energy for me; energy that I had spent fighting against poor social attitudes and stereotypes about me.”

How did ‘Journey to the Edge of the Room’ begin? What was it interested you about these latter-day hermits?

It all started when I was writing my thesis. I fell ill at the time and, since it was very cold outside, I rarely left the house. I did nothing but write my thesis and surf the Internet. It was while I was online that I discovered that one of my social-media friends – a girl called Svetlana – almost never leaves her apartment. Chatting online I soon discovered there were others like Svetlana who lived almost all of their life at home. After defending my diploma, I entered art school and decided to make a project about their lives.

Meeting these latter-day ‘hermits’, I was struck by how many hobbies and interested they have. They are knowledgeable about music and films, they read a lot. Their flats are filled with colourful posters and a variety of pets (usually cats). They were very sociable online, friendly and interesting to talk with. I asked each why they chose to live this way, and the answer is included in the caption to each portrait.

While shooting, I saw how addicted they are to social networks and online gaming, and I came to realise that their lifestyle is just an exaggerated version of the way many young people live today. I myself am a bit of an internet addict, just to a lesser extent.

Is this a common way of life?

More than people think – it’s just that they are not talked about. In Russia, you often hear about the loneliness of the elderly, but rarely about the way in which loneliness affects young people. I was surprised that, when I began looking for people to photograph, it turned out that almost all my acquaintances knew someone who lived this way.

Moscow is a very stressful sprawling city. It can take an hour and a half or even two hours to get to work, and the same to come home at night. At the first opportunity, people try to get a job working remotely online so that they can use public transport as little as possible. And so gradually they begin to close in on themselves. This kind of reclusiveness can definitely be a consequence of trauma, fatigue from the pressure of society, fear. Many of the people I have photographed have told me about getting panic attacks on public transport, especially in the metro.

Is there a Russian term to describe people who live this way? (In Japan they are called ‘hikikomori’.)

No, there is no exact equivalent for that term in Russian. You can’t really call them hermits, because in Russian the word sounds too poetic, religious, outdated. So, there is no easy way to describe people who lead this way of life. And that’s a problem. Because, without a name, they fall out of the public discourse. That is why I wanted to show that there are such people – to show how they live. To show this version of loneliness in a huge city that is so full of people.

Who are the people in the images and how did you meet them?

I had known Svetlana since we were at school, long before she chose this lifestyle. And my husband has an old school friend who now lives this way. So, I started photographing the series with them. Given we already knew each other it was easy enough to arrange. Then I just began asking everyone I knew for suggestions, former classmates, my hairdresser… And it turned out that many people had such acquaintances. And, of course, I posted online about my project asking for volunteers.

Given their lifestyle, how did they respond to you visiting their private domain?

With those that I actually got to photograph it was all quite relaxed. But there were people who agreed to the shoot and then cancelled at the last moment. Others would not open the door or declined to sign a consent to publish the images. But for the most part they were quite hospitable, showing me their homes and their favourite possessions with pleasure and pride: posters, books, collections of figurines… This was their territory; they communicated on their own terms. And some have continued to stay in touch to this day.

© Natalia Ershova from the series ‘Retrotopia’ 2019

‘Retrotopia’ explores a very different approach to the notions of inhabiting space, how did this begin?

There are quite a few monuments to the space program in Moscow and across Russia. As it happened, the office where I was working was right next to one of these monuments to the ‘conquerors of space’. It is huge – 107 metres high – and on foggy days the top is often covered by cloud. In fact, it was during the fog and rain that I noticed it for the first time. It towers like a dinosaur bone, surrounded at its base by advertising hoardings and the metro entrance – the trivial and the mundane. It might seem strange that one could ignore such a huge structure. But, for the most part, people seldom notice it.

The images have a particular aesthetic – misty, monochrome, almost dreamlike…

Initially, I had thought to shoot these monuments in the fog. To create that dreamy, floating effect. It seemed appropriate… Dreams so quickly fade – like these monuments, and time itself, and the now defunct nation that created them.

© Natalia Ershova from the series ‘Retrotopia’ 2019

However, many of these monuments were smaller and never became wrapped in cloud. I tried using smoke bombs, but they didn’t give the effect I wanted. Then I accidentally made a double exposure with a dark stormy sky. And the result reflected everything I wanted to say: the feeling of desolation as if the structure is lost in space, freezing.

What did you seek to express in this work?

I wanted to evoke a sense of detached nostalgia – not for the past, but for the way the past had imagined the future. When people do notice them, they simply see them as outdated, irrelevant. For an older generation they can evoke a certain nostalgia – not for the USSR, but rather for their youth. Yes, I know they were created as monumental propaganda. But now it’s as if they are covered with the dust of time, created once to inspire but now forgotten. It seems these melancholy structures are on the verge of disappearing – an exhaled manifesto of hopes.

This idea of scientific progress is brought up to date in your most recent series ‘The Fifth Quarter’.

The idea for this piece came when I was walking with my friend, and we saw ourselves in a street mirror. She looked at herself and asked: “Natash, do you recognise yourself in the mirror? I don’t recognise myself, it’s not my face.” (She had had plastic surgery a few months before.) As I drove home, I began to wonder how many things you have to change in yourself to stop being yourself… and how many things you have to change to stop being human. When you take a long-distance flight, you wake up in a different place and time zone. What would happen if you woke up so changed that you were a different person?

I had always been interested in this kind of idea and so I already had some background research. For the next six months I read a lot – scientific journals, books on philosophy, speculative fiction – and watched a variety of science-fiction movies.

The images show a kind of symbiotic – or perhaps parasitic – relationship between a bio-engineered augmentation that is worn, or perhaps lives upon, its human host. There is an uncanny normalcy to the images…

I approached the project with a certain detachment, but not indifference. It’s outsider’s perspective. There’s wonder, sorrow, acceptance – and at times, irony. I tried to evoke a sense of quiet anxiety – a cool acceptance of the fact that humans have long since ceased to be in control of progress and, with it, their own lives. But this work is not meant to frighten. On the contrary, it calmly states: yes, we are already in the future, this is where we live now. And beneath it all lies the question: What comes next?

How do you present the work?

The project takes the form of a documentary book (really, a mockumentary). A company called Amphibia has used knowledge of the human genome to free humans from Darwinian evolution. In this ambitious project, they didn’t look at ways to replace organs but to add new ones. These came in the form of semi-living creatures created in the laboratory which were then attached to and integrated with the individual host, supplementing the natural functions of the body. Making them – in the words of the corporate slogan – Just a little more than human.

The story is introduced by an investigative journalist who sets the scene. There are then a series of case studies with photographs of different augmented subjects who tell their own story in the accompanying text [excerpts from which are included with the captions here]. Together the images and texts suggest the complex interrelationship between desire, peer pressure, conformism, and anxiety that might motivate someone to undertake such a procedure.

What ideas or questions underlie that fictional narrative?

The work is an ethical reflection on technological progress. We cannot hide from progress: electricity and the Internet, for example, are fundamental to the functioning of our contemporary world. And all technological progress involves changes in the social order and social relations. We don’t control this. We cannot go back. We cannot simply switch off the electricity, because then the trains would stop, all the computers would shut down, and people would die in hospitals. So, in the end we must just accept the new rules of the game. It happens with any technology that is recognised by society: it changes the world, we become dependent upon it, and so it changes us.

What ethical questions are you exploring here?

Biotechnology raises some challenging issues. Do we have the right to create living beings and use them for our own purposes? And, if we do, who uses whom, we them or they us? As some people are ‘improved’ and others not, how will this disparity play out? How will augmented humans treat those who didn’t agree to it or simply could not afford it? Maybe the way we treat animals now? What will a post-human world be like?

It’s better to think about these questions beforehand, because there are profound implications.

Who will have power over the body? When the body becomes a site of biotechnology, whose territory will it be: the individual’s, the state’s, the corporations’, the scientific community’s? It won’t be easy – or even possible – to simply remove an implant.

And, more fundamentally, do we have the moral right to take control of evolution? What will happen to humanity if it chooses to abandon Darwinian logic? What will become of values, relationships, culture? What about art? Art is the language through which one human speaks to another. How might this affect the ‘eternal’ themes of love and death? Will the art of the past just cease to be relevant?

Why do you call this ‘The Fifth Quarter’?

I actually spent a long time thinking about what to call this project. Titles usually come to me during the process of making – and this time was no different. I went through many options, and among them, the phrase The Fifth Quarter floated to the surface. It struck me as suitably absurdist – after all, a human has four limbs, and the implant becomes, in a way, a fifth…

In making these three bodies of work, what have you learned about yourself that you did not previously know?

To be honest, with each of these projects I ended up learning something new about myself.

When I was photographing the hermits, I realised just how much my own life depends on the Internet. And how often I choose to stay home or go shoot alone, rather than spend time with others. I looked at their belongings on the shelves and felt that I could easily live the same way they do. After the project ended, I found out that one of the subjects had passed away and, later, that some had lost their apartments and were evicted. They could not escape the world outside; they were deeply anxious individuals, some of whom suffered from panic attacks. And I realised that I, too, am developing social anxiety.

Shooting ‘Retrotopia’ was an adventure – a journey of discovery. It was probably during that time I fully understood that I wanted to dedicate my life to photography, that this is truly my life. Until then, I hadn’t really made a living from photography.

And ‘The Fifth Quarter’?

This is my most technically challenging project to date – not so much emotionally, but in terms of process. I had to learn a lot about working with silicone, then came the book layout and writing all the stories. Meanwhile, I came to realise that even while I’m still making the work, AI and other technologies are already accelerating so fast. The future is already here, much sooner than I expected.

© Natalia Ershova – Olesya, 35 years old. Tambov district, Sosnovka Village. 2021
Extract: “Olesya was one of Amphibia’s key scientists, but she resigned after the product was released to the market. Now she lives like a hermit in the Tambov district. She refused to answer any questions after finding out I was a journalist.”

---

---

This interview is a Talking Pictures original.

---